Posts categorized as Penguins

I awoke on the morning of 6 March to discover that we had very rapid progress over night and were approaching the rugged columnular basalt cliffs of the Antipodes Island, crowned with green tussocks. The home to the Antipodean albatross,the Antipodes Island parakeet and the erect-crested penguin (to name just a few of the birds!)…. Read more »

In the early hours of the 25th, we were awoken and called to the bridge to see the biggest wall of ice that I will probably ever see. The Ross Ice Shelf, and enormous slab faced Ice sheet stretching over 700km from Cape Crozier to the Bay of Whales. The height of the visible face… Read more »

Not Lower and Upper Hutt, but instead the story of two attempts at the pole. That of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the voyage of the Nimrod, and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Terra Nova expedition. We awoke to another extraordinary day at anchor off Cape Royds. The lunar landscape, derived from the explosive outpourings… Read more »

Scott Base, as South as we go: In a place where the sun sets at 12.30 and rises at 2.30 sights just get more and more incredible. At 1am the sea around the boat started to freeze, the water became grainy and and looked like grease, slowing as the ship carved through it, the… Read more »

After 6 days at sea, we finally sighted land, Franklin Island, with it’s glacial snow cap looked like Eden after the roller coaster ride of the Ross Sea. Franklin Island is home to a large colony of Adelie penguins and is the hangout for a few Weddell seals. Weddell seals generally live by the fixed… Read more »

Heading south from Macquarie Island we have had some relatively calm seas, pretty remarkable for this part of the world. Leaving the Roaring Forties which gave us a pretty slow rolling sea the fifties gave us a small taste of what it had to offer with some mild five-metre seas. Passing past 60 degrees south was… Read more »

We arrived at Macquarie Island – the sheltered waters in the lee of the island provided a welcome relief from the open ocean we had crossed between here and the Auckland Islands. The cool subantarctic summer did not detract from the spectacular wildlife – elephant seals and penguins everywhere! Until 1920 the elephant seals and penguins… Read more »

I visited Enderby in 1995 as part of the DOC Sealion project. The project is still going today. Sadly the most noticeable thing on my return was the much smaller numbers of sealions and pups. It is very saddening to hear from Louise Chilvers (DOC’s sealion biologist) that the population has decreased… Read more »

After leaving the port of Bluff, we took our sunset cruise down past Stewart Island on towards the Snares, our first port of call in Our Far South. The first marine mammal spotting of the trip was a small pod of Southern right whale dolphins, these spectacularly sleek animals have no dorsal fin and gave… Read more »

Welcome to Our Far South. This coming Friday I will be standing on the dock at Bluff, looking south, and about to board a boat heading to the sub-Antarctic Islands and the great white continent itself as part of the Our Far South project (www.ourfarsouth.org). What will I see? We all know about Stewart Island… Read more »